Notes on GCC's Native Language Support
By and large, only diagnostic messages have been internationalized.
Some work remains in other areas; for example, GCC does not yet allow
non-ASCII letters in identifiers.
Not all of GCC's diagnostic messages have been internationalized. Programs
like `genattr' (in fact all gen* programs) are not internationalized, as
their users are GCC maintainers who typically need to be able to read
English anyway; internationalizing them would thus entail needless work for
the human translators. Messages used for debugging, such as used in dumped
tables, should also not be translated.
The GCC library should not contain any messages that need
internationalization, because it operates below the internationalization
library.
Unlike some other GNU programs, the GCC sources contain few instances
of explicit translation calls like _("string"). Instead, the
diagnostic printing routines automatically translate their arguments.
For example, GCC source code should not contain calls like `error
(_("unterminated comment"))'; it should contain calls like `error
("unterminated comment")' instead, as it is the `error' function's
responsibility to translate the message before the user sees it.
By convention, any function parameter in the GCC sources whose name
ends in `msgid' is expected to be a message requiring translation.
If the parameter name ends with `gmsgid', it is assumed to be a GCC
diagnostics format string requiring translation, if it ends with
`cmsgid', it is assumed to be a format string for `printf' family
of functions, requiring a translation.
For example, the `error' function's first parameter is named `gmsgid'.
GCC's exgettext script uses this convention to determine which
function parameter strings need to be translated. The exgettext
script also assumes that any occurrence of `%eMSGID}' on a source
line, where MSGID does not contain `%' or `}', corresponds to a
message MSGID that requires translation; this is needed to identify
diagnostics in GCC spec strings.
The `G_(GMSGID)' macro defined in intl.h can be used to mark GCC diagnostics
format strings as requiring translation, but other than that it is a
no-op at runtime.
If you modify source files, you'll need at least version 0.14.15 of the
GNU gettext package to propagate the modifications to the translation
tables.
After having built and installed these gettext tools, you have to
configure GCC with --enable-maintainer-mode to get the master catalog
rebuilt.